He's not tried this one at home, or FreeNAS, but he thought the above system based on Ubuntu might be easier to get going. They're both free so no loss in trying them. I might just try this one first since I also want to try Ubuntu on some other systems.

In my day job, I work with a lot of enterprise storage. One of my gripes is that the storage vendors basically give the disks away for free, but make money off of the software. It's a gimmick, like ninety nice cent two liters of soda at the supermarket.

Due to this, the disks at work are frequently antiquated and slow.

In order to prove my point, I built a NAS using OpenFiler, and it absolutely *smoked* the performance of our multimillion dollar Storage Area Network.

The guys at work weren't too happy about that.

Anyways, you can get wicked performance out of "free" solutions like OpenFiler. Sun's ZFS is neat too.

The Fujitsu Eagle was the hot drive around the time of my first hardware design job involving mass storage. The controller was the Zylogics 440 2 Multibus board set with a microcoded bit slice, and then the 450 where they got it down to one board.

In order to prove my point, I built a NAS using OpenFiler, and it absolutely *smoked* the performance of our multimillion dollar Storage Area Network.

Have fun.

It wasn't too long ago that they were using relatively low capacity but fast 10-15K RPM SCSI drives in enterprise systems:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822332010
Is this what you're talking about? Or something much more high end being that you mention multimillion dollar systems. I find that in most businesses hardware is kept for a very long time because it is so much more expensive and any change might cause down time. Only companies that require the latest and fastest to succeed upgrade often IME.

In my day job, I work with a lot of enterprise storage. One of my gripes is that the storage vendors basically give the disks away for free, but make money off of the software. It's a gimmick, like ninety nice cent two liters of soda at the supermarket.

Due to this, the disks at work are frequently antiquated and slow.

In order to prove my point, I built a NAS using OpenFiler, and it absolutely *smoked* the performance of our multimillion dollar Storage Area Network.

The guys at work weren't too happy about that.

Anyways, you can get wicked performance out of "free" solutions like OpenFiler. Sun's ZFS is neat too.

Have fun.

It all depends on how you measure "performance". To use a car analogy is it how long it takes you to get to work or how long it takes you to move 100 tons of crushed rock across town. It first case a fast motorcycle would have better performance but and old dump truck would beat it hands down on the second test.

A PC running FreeBSD is like the Motorcycle. See what happens if you try and serve 2,500 desktop machines with your "fast" server.

For home use, of course you want the motorcycle.

The other way to measure is "performance per dollar" or performance per watt of power. The PC based "fast" server may loose if measured that way

The best why to grade a system is if it is well suited to its purpose and no more costly to it needs to be for that purpose.

(agree about ZFS. I'm a long time Solaris fan and user going back to the eary SunOS days when it was MC68000 based.)